THEATER
WAR CRIES
Stage Left’s streaming production An Iliad gives audiences a startling look at what war does to humanity BY DAN NAILEN
I Robert Tombari (the Poet) runs through lines in An Iliad at Stage Left Theater. YOUNG KWAK PHOTO
24 INLANDER JANUARY 28, 2021
magine if, through twists of time and space, you were cursed to live through humanity’s worst moments. Moments when men and women brutally clash on battlefields, suffer in infirmaries, die at each others’ hands via swords, guns, spears and bombs. Then imagine your lot in life is to move through the centuries telling stories of those wars, forever forced to relive those horrific clashes until humanity finally wises up and stops killing each other. That seems like a pipe dream, I know, the ending of war. But that’s the only hope for the Poet to change his life in An Iliad, a new filmed stage production arriving Friday from Spokane’s Stage Left Theater.
It’s part of the theater’s Alone Together series of prerecorded streaming productions that will run through 2021 thanks to a Spokane Arts Grant Award. At its heart, Lisa Peterson and Denis O’Hare’s play An Iliad is an epic and imaginative work of The Iliad fan fiction, and based on Robert Fagles’ translation of Homer’s Trojan War tale. When Peterson and O’Hare wrote their play, they were driven by their reaction to the 2003 Iraq War and searching for a way via the theater to address what it means to be a country at war. That eventually led them to The Iliad, and then to create their own character within Homer’s work, the Poet. ...continued on page 26